Why modern states and economies developed in Europe first, and later in India and China.

Why did modern states and economies develop first in the peripheral and late-coming culture of Europe? This historical puzzle looms behind every study of industrialization and economic development. In his analytical and comparative work Eric Jones sees the economic condition forming where natural environments and political systems meet: Europe's economic rise is explained as a favoured interaction between them, contrasting with the frustrating pattern of their interplay in the Ottoman empire, India and China. For the second edition Professor Jones has added a new introduction and an updated bibliographical guide.

This book undertakes a theoretical and econometric analysis of intense economic growth in selected European countries during the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty first. Focusing on the accelerated economic growth that occurred in Ireland, the Netherlands, Spain, and Turkey, this book investigates the determinants and consequences of this “miracle” growth and discusses them in context of growth and development processes observed in European market-type economies after the World War II. Using imperfect knowledge economics (IKE) as a theoretical framework to interpret the empirical results, this book provides a fresh theoretical perspective in comparison with current Neo-classical, Keynesian and institutional paradigms. With this systematic approach, the authors seek to provide a unified methodology for evaluating the phenomenon of intense economic growth that has heretofore been missing from the discipline. Combining diverse theoretical and methodological strategies to provide a holistic understanding of the historical process of economic change, this volume will be of interest to students and scholars of economic growth, econometrics, political economy, and the new institutional economics as well as policymakers.

The essays selected for this volume show how the Pacific rapidly became part of an industrializing world. Its raw materials (notably rubber and copper) were critical, some of its handicraft industries were devastated by mechanized competition, others survived and adapted, contributing to distinctive patterns of industrialization that made Japan a new center of power, and also laid the groundwork for later growth in Taiwan, Korea, and coastal China. The Pacific coast of the Americas was also first drawn into an industrial world largely as an exporter of raw materials, but North and South diverged rapidly, portending futures even more different than those of Northeast and Southeast Asia. By the 1930s - when the uneven effects of industrialization would have much to do with plunging the Pacific into war - one can already glimpse in outline the structural bases for many of the region's contemporary characteristics. All this is set in context in the important introduction by Kenneth Pomeranz.

This influential book challenges one of the most pervasive and powerful beliefs of our time--that Europe rose to modernity and world dominance due to unique qualities of race, environment, culture, mind, or spirit, and that progress for the rest of the world resulted from the diffusion of European civilization. J. M. Blaut persuasively argues that this doctrine is not grounded in the facts of history and geography, but in the ideology of colonialism. Blaut traces the colonizer's model of the world from its 16th-century origins to its present form in theories of economic development, modernization, and new world order.

The idea of long-term European dominance is characteristic of most evolutionary theories of human culture and society in the nineteenth century. It was commonly believed that there was a natural progression from Antiquity through Feudalism to Capitalism which could not have taken place elsewhere. Today there are many who still believe that this progression was part of a European miracle that underlay the rise to global supremacy of the West. In this short book Jack Goody systematically dismantles this Eurocentric view of the world. He argues that we need to look, not for a European miracle, but rather for a Eurasian miracle that went back to the Urban Revolution of the Bronze Age, that affected the Near East, India and China well before Europe and that was much advanced by the adoption of writing. Under these conditions we find a long-term exchange of information between East and West, and the dominance of one followed by the dominance of the other - in other words, alternation rather than dominance. There were measures during the Renaissance in Europe that made for continuous growth, especially the secularization of learning, but it appears that the period of Western supremacy is now coming to an end and that we are about to experience a further alternation in favour of the East.

In the wake of globalization, the humanities and social sciences have explored the existence and the possibilities of human community on a global scale. But these investigations have been developed within separate academic disciplines, with little exchange of ideas across disciplinary boundaries. This book draws together a variety of perspectives to offer an interdisciplinary, and critical, examination of global community past and present. The volume opens with a contribution by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, one of the world's most renowned scholars in the humanities, then follows up with original contributions by established and promising young researchers from across the humanities and the social sciences. The chapters provide conceptual, normative and empirical investigations of global community, examining it through the lenses of postcolonialism, cosmopolitanism, world literature, transnational networks, and global ethics. The book contributes to a renewed debate about the past, present and future of global community, allowing for a broader and deeper understanding of these timely phenomena across disciplinary boundaries.

An important and provocative text which will profoundly affect the way we look at the evolution of the third world, at development and underdevelopment.

Miracles, signs of divine presence and intervention, have been esteemed by Christians, especially Catholic Christians, as central to religious belief. During the second half of the eighteenth century, Spain's Bourbon dynasty sought to tighten its control over New World colonies, reform imperial institutions, and change the role of the church and religion in colonial life. As a result, miracles were recognized and publicized sparingly by the church hierarchy, and colonial courts were increasingly reluctant to recognize the events. Despite this lack of official encouragement, stories of amazing healings, rescues, and acts of divine retribution abounded throughout Mexico. Consisting of three rare documents about miracles from this period, each accompanied by an introductory essay, this study serves as a source book and complement to the author's Shrines and Miraculous Images: Religious Life in Mexico Before the Reforma.

The idea of the earth as a vessel in space came of age in an era shaped by space travel and the Cold War. Höhler’s study brings together technology, science and ecology to explore the way this latter-day ark was invoked by politicians, environmentalists, cultural historians, writers of science fiction and many others across three decades.